Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to user authentication in content distribution and more particularly to identifying a user accessing distributed content over a computer communications network.
Description of the Related Art
The growth of the Internet largely can be attributed to the desire for remotely disposed individuals to share content. Long before the development of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and the World Wide Web, academics, bureaucrats and private individuals indexed and exchanged content over the Internet. The explosion of Internet use following the development of the World Wide Web, however, has resulted in a vast sea of content leading to creation by necessity of advanced content searching applications used almost universally by all users of the Internet today.
Content can be characterized as passive or active. Passive content refers to content able only to be perceived (viewed in a visual mode, or heard in an audible mode, by way of example) while active content permits user interactivity with the content. The venerable Web based form represents a traditional form of interactive content in which content is presented in a Web page along with one or more input fields such as text input fields, radio buttons, check boxes, drop down boxes, and the like, into which an end user can provide information to be received and processed by back end programmatic logic.
In the case of a Web site providing passive content, oftentimes it is desirable to customize the passive content or arrangement of the passive content in the Web site according to the identity of the end user viewing the Web site. For example, an e-commerce site might prefer presenting products known to be of interest to a viewing end user. In the case of a Web site providing active content, it is just as desirable to customize the interactions with the Web site, for example by pre-populating fields of a form with information known to be associated with an interacting end user. Of note, customization of Web site content can be provided in connection with the degree to which a viewing end user is authorized to interact with particular content on the Web site.
Of note, irrespective of the passive or active nature of content in a Web site, many Web sites provide for progressively different disclosures of content based upon how certain a viewing end user can be identified. Also known as “step-up authentication”, a Web site utilizing step-up authentication can attempt to identify an end user through the use of cookies or flash files in which user credentials are stored, the manual provision by the end user of credentials in a log-in screen, the provision of a certificate, or the provision of biometric data, to name a few examples. Cookies and flash files also have proven helpful in the field of Web site analytics in tracking the browsing behavior of the end user in interacting with the content of a Web site.
However, cookies and flash files are limited to the relationship between the computing device storing the cookie or flash file and the computing device used to attempt access to the secure content. Consequently, when attempting access to a Web site from a computing device that differs from the computing device in which the cookie or flash file is stored, manual identification and authentication of the end user will be required. Further, even where a single device is used both to store a cookie or flash file and to access the Web site, many end users frequently direct the periodic removal of cookies and other temporary files so as to require the later re-identification and authentication of the end user.